Organic Candied Coconut Original

Brand: Maika’i

Cost: $2.00

Found at: Foodland

My father is an easygoing man: steady and agreeable and unassuming, he is placidly content with his lot in life. To those who don’t know him very well, it’s easy to assume that he does not have strong opinions about anything, but that’s not true. On at least one topic, my father has a very strong opinion. My father HATES coconut. 

And because fate plays cruel jokes, he finds himself the odd man out in a family of coconut lovers. It’s a running joke that my father only found out about my mother’s love of coconut after they were married. Had he known before, he tells us, he never would have gone through with it. My mother, however, sees a distinct advantage in a husband who hates coconut: it leaves all the more for her. 

Now that I am here on Maui, I am taking full advantage of the tropical cuisine to stuff myself with as much coconut as I can physically handle. Coconut drinks, coconut puddings, coconut cake; I have to get while the getting is good. And the getting is VERY good. 

These snacks, for example, are easily some of my favorite coconut treats on the island. They are basically a cubic version of the sweetened coconut shavings from the baking isle. They are all coconut and sugar and I love them for it. Sitting on the porch and munching on these sweet little dice of delight, I am filled with memories of macaroons and German chocolate cakes and handfuls of coconut shavings stolen from the family kitchen. It’s absolute heaven in a cube and I could eat them all day.

My father would be so disappointed.